realised that was probably only because he lived on his own. It’s easy enough to be overt when you know there’s no one watching. If he had been cohabiting with someone who monitored his every sip, he wondered how long it would be before he resorted to subterfuge. He had an uneasy recollection of a bit of covert swigging towards the end of the time when he and Frances had lived together. Mark Lear led the way back to their coffees with a smug, got-away-with-it smile. He produced a packet of

is turned, Louise reaches in panic to a drawer in a desk beside her chair.) Ooh, it was so cold out there. Goodness, I thought I’d – LOUISE (producing a pistol from the drawer and pointing it at Aubrey’s back): Freeze! AUBREY: Exactly. (He turns back to face Louise. Seeing that he’s looking down the barrel of a gun, he throws his hands up in the air.) Aagh! His trousers once again fall down. The general feeling about the run-through had been pretty good. At the end, Rob Parrott, of Parrott

exchange as well. She grimaced. For her it was just another manifestation of the unfairness of a business in which it wasn’t what you could do, it was who you knew. For Charles, though, it had other potential meanings. Tony Delaunay’s words about Bernard’s image brought home to him again how damaging news of an affair with a girl barely out of her teens could be. But was the secret sufficiently important for the star to murder someone who threatened to expose it? Charles noticed that Cookie

through the glass, Charles could see her mouth was still twitching uncontrollably. ‘Yes,’ he said. With enormous concentration, he emptied his mind of everything, bleached the words he had to say of all meaning or connotation, and managed to pronounce, ‘Last gasp’ – two-second pause – ‘Last lap’ – two-second pause – ‘Home straight’ – two-second pause – ‘Last t-t-t-t-’ But this time it was the word ‘trump’ that wouldn’t come. Once again the two of them had dissolved into hopeless giggling. ‘I

seemed plain dull. Nor could Charles find much good to say about the author’s prose style. Still, it was work, and work that could lead to other work. Lisa Wilson had organised a deal with a publisher to record a whole series of such romances. The audio book market was a growing one, and it would be handy for Charles to join that select list of not-very-famous but reliable actors who spend much of their time in the intimacy of small recording studios reading books out loud. It was an